Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts

Black Walden

Black Walden

Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts

Elise Lemire

PENN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2009 Elise Lemire

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lemire, Elise.

Black Walden : slavery and its aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts/Elise Lemire.

     p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4180-8 (alk. paper)

1. Slavery—Massachusetts—Concord—History. 2. Slaves—Massachusetts—Concord—Social conditions. 3. Concord (Mass.)—Social conditions—18th century. 4. Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862. Walden I. Title.

F74.C8L46 2009

974.4'4--dc22

2009001010

For my parents,

Robert and Virginia Lemire

EAST OF MY BEAN-FIELD, across the road, lived Cato Ingraham, slave of Duncan Ingraham, Esquire, gentleman of Concord village; who built his slave a house, and gave him permission to live in Walden Woods;—Cato, not Uticensis, but Concordiensis. Some say that he was a Guinea Negro. There are a few who remember his little patch among the walnuts, which he let grow up till he should be old and need them; but a younger and whiter speculator got them at last. He too, however, occupies an equally narrow house at present. Cato’s half-obliterated cellar hole still remains, though known to few, being concealed from the traveller by a fringe of pines. It is now filled with the smooth sumach (Rhus glabra,) and one of the earliest species of golden-rod (Solidago stricta) grows there luxuriantly.

Here, by the very corner of my field, still nearer to town, Zilpha, a colored woman, had her little house, where she spun linen for the townsfolk, making the Walden Woods ring with her shrill singing, for she had a loud and notable voice. At length, in the war of 1812, her dwelling was set on fire by English soldiers, prisoners on parole, when she was away, and her cat and dog and hens were all burned up together. She led a hard life, and somewhat inhumane. One old frequenter of these woods remembers, that as he passed her house one noon he heard her muttering to herself over her gurgling pot,—Ye are all bones, bones! I have seen bricks amid the oak copse there.

Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister’s Hill, lived Brister Freeman, a handy Negro, slave of Squire Cummings once,—there where grow still the apple-trees which Brister planted and tended; large old trees now, but their fruit still wild and ciderish to my taste. Not long since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln burying-ground, a little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some British grenadiers who fell in the retreat from Concord,—where he is styled Sippio Brister,—Scipio Africanus he had some title to be called,—a man of color’ as if he were discolored. It also told me, with staring emphasis, when he died; which was but an indirect way of informing me that he ever lived. With him dwelt Fenda, his hospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet pleasantly,—large, round, and black, blacker than any of the children of night, such a dusky orb as never rose on Concord before or since.

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Walden (1854)

CONTENTS

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Introduction               The Memory of These Human Inhabitants

Chapter 1                   Squire Cuming

Chapter 2                   The Codman Place

Chapter 3                   British Grenadiers

Chapter 4                   The Last of the Race Departed

Chapter 5                   Permission to Live in Walden Woods

Chapter 6                   Little Gardens and Dwellings

Chapter 7                   Concord Keeps Its Ground

Epilogue                    Brister Freeman’s Hill

Dramatis Personae

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

The Concord landscape has changed dramatically in the decade since I lamented in the Epilogue to the first edition of this book the lack of markers about and memorials to the town’s slavery history and the contributions of its early African and African American residents. Noting that the Toni Morrison Society had just started an initiative elsewhere to erect memorial slavery benches so that the public could, in Morrison’s words, summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves, I suggested that Concord needed such a bench as a counterpoint to the Minuteman Statue and other local iconography that focuses exclusively on celebrating the town as the birthplace of American liberty and literature.

These days, there are two such benches in Concord, as well as many other markers that radically reframe the stories long told at the Old North Bridge, Walden Pond, and Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Thanks to the leadership of a local group of citizens, it is no longer possible to visit these storied places and focus exclusively on the role of self-sufficient white farmers in birthing the nation or on the celebrated authors of classics such as Walden, Nature, The Scarlet Letter, and Little Women.

The Drinking Gourd Project, as the nonprofit organization initially called itself, erected the first memorial to Concord’s enslaved residents and their descendants in 2011 (two years after the initial publication of Black Walden) in the form of a beautiful granite boulder placed in Walden Woods and inscribed as follows:

Near here lived Brister Freeman (d. 1822)

Formerly enslaved in Concord

Fenda Freeman (d. 1811) and their family

The marker also quotes Henry David Thoreau’s careful description in Walden of the home site’s location, thereby making clear that Thoreau understood he was not the first Concord resident to try to eke out a living in Walden Woods.

In 2010, a Concord farmhouse previously inhabited by a formerly enslaved man, his family, and their descendants became available for sale, and the Drinking Gourd Project raised the money to purchase and restore it. With permission from the National Park Service and assistance from the town, the organization took the house’s name as its own and moved the Robbins House to a site across the street from both the Old Manse, long famous for its role in American literary history, and the Old North Bridge, where area colonial militiamen exchanged deadly gunfire with British Regulars on the morning of April 19, 1775, and since memorialized as the birthplace of American liberty.

The board of the Robbins House applied for and was awarded the Toni Morrison Society’s fifth memorial bench. Seated on this bench next to the tiny house, visitors looking over to the three-story Old Manse and the entrance to the Old North Bridge battle area are afforded the opportunity to complicate their understanding of the nation’s history. Reverend William Emerson, the grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson, held people in bondage at the Old Manse even as he urged his peers to fight for their natural rights. And those African and African American men who were able to fight in the Revolution and use it or other means to take their own freedom still faced segregation and poverty in the town they had served for so long.

In 2013, the Walden Woods Project obtained the second memorial bench for Concord from the Toni Morrison Society, for Thoreau’s Path, an interpretive trail that memorializes the author of Walden on the very hill where Brister Freeman once lived. When the path was created in 2006, the entrance sign referred to Freeman as a freed slave, as if Concord and enslavement could not be as synonymous as Concord and freedom have always been. This memorial bench, the home site marker already in place, and two more being pursued (to mark where Zilpah White and Cato Ingraham lived) make clear what I hope to have detailed in the pages that follow: that Walden Woods is an important black heritage site. One of the earliest Northern experiments in black independent living was bravely conducted here.

Equally exciting is the research on Concord’s later African and African American history, ongoing since Black Walden’s initial publication. We now know that Ellen Garrison Jackson, who was born in the Robbins House in 1823, moved south to educate formerly enslaved men, women, and children in a Maryland Freedmen’s school. In 1866, she and another teacher tested the country’s first civil rights act by taking a seat in a segregated Baltimore train station waiting room. We know too that Peter Hutchinson, himself the descendant of enslaved parents, and who purchased the Robbins House around 1870 and managed to raise five children in it, was buried in an anonymous grave in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, since marked with a gravestone by the Robbins House board. Most strikingly, we now know that the Concord son of former slaves Jenny and Thomas Dugan enlisted in the first black regiment in the Civil War. Under the direction of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the aptly named George Washington Dugan and 280 other men of the 54th Regiment Massachusetts Voluntary Infantry famously stormed Fort Wagner in South Carolina on July 18, 1863. Nearly half of the company, which never retreated, was killed or never accounted for. Dugan is listed among the latter, most likely having been one of the unidentified dead buried hastily in what the poet Robert Lowell would later describe as a ditch. Rick Frese, author of Concord and the Civil War: From Walden Pond to the Gettysburg Front (2014), has petitioned the town to correct the fact that Dugan’s name does not appear on the thirty-foot-tall memorial Civil War obelisk, erected in Concord’s Monument square in 1867, alongside those of the forty-eight other brave men who also made the ultimate sacrifice.

The Robbins House board and other stakeholders in Concord’s local history remain focused on rendering visible the black history of Concord, by continuing to set up signs and markers, organizing exhibits, sponsoring informational talks, and staging reenactments that demonstrate the connections between the efforts of Concord’s African and African American residents and contemporary social justice issues. They recognize that every generation has an opportunity and a duty to rethink how the past is written on the landscape. Whether in the form of simple signage, more elaborate memorials, or books such as this one, calls to remember the nation’s slavery history and the heroic efforts of those caught in its web aspire to ensure that the nation does better by all of its citizens in the future.

Black Walden

INTRODUCTION

The Memory of These Human Inhabitants

EACH YEAR, HALF A MILLION PEOPLE visit Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. Most come to pay homage to Henry David Thoreau, who for two years lived a quiet, contemplative life in a small cabin he built not far from the pond’s shores. And yet in Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), his famous account of his experiment in subsistence living, Thoreau asks us to experience the Walden landscape as a rich repository of a long and complicated human history that began well before his arrival in 1845. He devotes the better part of a chapter to a community of former Concord slaves who lived not far from his cabin during the first four decades of the new nation’s existence. Their experiences after emancipation were one reason Thoreau was drawn to live in Walden Woods himself. He regarded the former slaves’ persistence in the face of isolation and harassment as heroic, and like them he sought to live independently. He also enjoyed living in a part of town where, because of its past association with former slaves and other outcasts, few of his white contemporaries chose to linger.

Mary Minot was one of those people who avoided Walden Woods when she could. Her story, which Thoreau uses in Walden, is a good place to start a book that investigates the long-forgotten connection between Walden Woods and Concord’s slave history. Mary was born in Concord six years after her father Ephraim fought the British at Concord’s North Bridge in 1775. While her father could say he helped set in motion one of the great political revolutions in western history, Mary led a relatively quiet life. She never married and lived with her younger brother George and her business partner, Elizabeth Potter, in an unpainted, four-room cottage. George Minot, who also never married, spent his days farming and fishing, rarely venturing from the town in which his ancestors had lived since the mid-seventeenth century. Only once did he go as far as Boston, even after tracks were laid in 1844 and the port city became reachable in an hour by train. Mary made a meager living as a seamstress, sewing clothes with Miss Potter’s assistance for the town’s second-class laboring men. She was rarely asked to make anything for her neighbor, Concord’s wealthiest resident, the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who lived diagonally across the road from her and to whom the Minots regularly sold eggs and cream. Henry David Thoreau, a dear friend of George’s and just as eccentric, was a more frequent customer. The Harvard graduate famously shunned the black suits worn by the educated men of his day, requesting of Miss Minot clay-colored corduroy clothes with overly large pockets for his daily walks so he could carry his notebook and spyglass easily and be less conspicuous in the fields as he tracked Concord’s wildlife. Mary also sewed for her younger sister Lavina Minot Baker who, with her husband Joseph, had five children. Mary would walk two and a half miles to the Baker farm on the Lincoln side of Walden Woods and stay for a day or two.¹

Years later, George Minot told Thoreau about a particular August day Mary spent in Lincoln sewing for their sister. After hours spent bent over her needle, Mary attempted to carry home what her brother told Thoreau was the rather onerous present of a watermelon, prompting Thoreau to recall in his journal the old saying that a person cannot carry two melons under one arm and to note that it is difficult to carry one far, it is so slippery. Mary was seventy-eight when Thoreau recounted her attempt in an 1859 journal entry. The day she set off through Walden Woods with a heavy watermelon in her arms must have taken place years earlier, probably in the 1820s or 1830s when Lavina’s children were growing fast and their wardrobes thus in constant need of attention. Mary, then in her forties or fifties, set out holding the tricky fruit as best she could, eager to share this favorite summer treat with her brother and Miss Potter. Called the Great County Road in its heyday, the road she followed is known today as Walden Street or Route 126. The stagecoach used to rumble along this way, as did numerous farmers’ wagons and rich men’s chaises, all conveying goods and people either north to New Hampshire or east to Boston via its connection to the mainland at Roxbury Neck. But since the completion of a bridge that connected Charlestown to Boston in 1785, the majority of traffic ran farther to the east along the Lexington road, formerly called the Bay road, which now ran directly into Boston. The Walden road had since become a mere shadow of its former self, used by Concord and Lincoln residents mainly to access their woodlots.²

On this particular day, however, the farmers who normally filled the woods with the ringing of their axes must have been celebrating the end of haying season with their annual fishing trip to Dorchester. And although Mary sometimes brought her partner with her to Lincoln, she had made this visit alone. There was no one to help carry the watermelon or any of the other items Mary toted. Nor was there anyone to keep her company as the silence closed in around her. All she could hear were the whispering of the pines Thoreau described as so close to the road they would scrape both sides of a chaise at once.³

As Thoreau well knew and as he points out in his journal on the occasion of reporting what happened next, Walden Woods … had a rather bad reputation for goblins and so on in those days. As a young child, he had heard reports from other children about an Indian doctor living there who caught small boys and cut out their livers to make medicine. More recently, Mary’s brother George had told him of once hearing a colored woman … somewhat witch-like, mutter something like an incantation over the contents of a cauldron she was stirring in a small hut in Walden Woods. Ye are all bones, bones! she cackled in what George described as a shrill voice. Thoreau had heard too of a large, round, and black fortune-teller who had lived just down the road from the witch. Having presumably heard these same stories from her brother or other locals, Mary became anxious as she approached the remnants of the dwellings in which these notorious characters once lived. The watermelon, Thoreau notes, did not grow any lighter, though frequently shifted from arm to arm. Quickening her pace, Mary failed to keep her grip on the slippery melon. It smashed to pieces in the middle of the Walden road. Thoreau muses only half seriously that the accident might have been caused by one of those mischievous goblins. Certainly Mary thought so. Her brother reported to Thoreau that, trembling, she stopped only to gather the choicest pieces of fruit in her handkerchief before she flew rather than ran with them to the peaceful streets of Concord. In Walden, Thoreau draws on Mary’s experience of the Walden road, writing that women and children who were compelled to go this way to Lincoln alone and on foot did it with fear, and often ran a good part of the distance.⁴

Figure 1. Herbert Wendell Gleason, Walden from Emerson’s Cliff. Photographed November 7, 1899. Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.

I GREW UP IN LINCOLN, MASSACHUSETTS, in a house two miles from Walden Pond (Figure 1). The Walden Woods I knew in the 1970s and 1980s was not a place one feared. I took swimming lessons at Walden Pond in my childhood, canoed it as a teenager, and returned regularly over the years to hike its perimeter, often alone. I had no idea during my childhood or early adulthood that there had once been former slaves in the area—let alone slaves in Concord—or that Thoreau’s experiment in subsistence living was influenced by their lives. The homes of the former slaves had vanished. My white, suburban upbringing had not compelled me to think particularly hard about slavery anyway, much less about how slavery might have shaped the privileged, leafy world I inhabited. In fact, Concord was the last place I thought about when I thought about slavery at all.

All that I knew about Concord was what I had been taught in school: that it gave birth to the nation and the nation’s literature. When friends would visit from out of town, I was as eager to show off Concord’s many famous sites as they were to tour them. We would begin our walking tour at the Old North Bridge, where the American Revolution began on April 19, 1775, when the colonial militia or minutemen faced down British regulars and sent them fleeing back to Boston. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s description of the embattled farmer and the shot heard round the world is etched on an obelisk at the eastern side of the bridge. On the western side is a statue of a local man leaving behind his plow to take up his musket against his mother country. Since its erection on the one hundredth anniversary of Concord Fight, the Minuteman Statue has become iconographic, a statement that the commitment of the United States to liberty is natural and thus inevitable, having sprung from the very soil, the Concord soil, tilled by local farmers. On my twelfth birthday, I received a miniature, sterling silver version of the Minuteman Statue to add to my charm bracelet, a reminder that I was born where American freedom began.⁵

After showing friends the bridge, I would lead them to the nearby house where Emerson’s grandfather watched the battle from his backyard. This was where the tour would turn to American literature, which, like the country, was arguably born within sight of the North Bridge, making this part of Concord doubly sacred ground. Emerson was staying here when he drafted his essay Nature (1836) before purchasing the house in which he lived across from George and Mary Minot for the rest of his life. A newly married Nathaniel Hawthorne later rented the same house by the bridge. once called the Manse in honor of the ministers who lived in it, first the Reverend William Emerson and then the Reverend Ezra Ripley, it came to be called by the name Hawthorne gave it in the book he wrote while living there, Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). Toward the end of his life, the author of The Scarlet Letter (1850) purchased another home in Concord he named the Wayside. This house is located next-door to Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women (1868), the much-beloved tale of four sisters attempting to make their own way in a world that would have preferred their conformity. American literature has long been celebrated for its deep commitment to the same values the colonial militia fought for in the town that would later produce so many of the nation’s most prominent authors: personal freedom and individualism. And first among the American classics written in Concord that celebrates these values is Walden. And so after touring the battle site and the Old Manse, my friends and I would head next to Walden Pond.⁶

Like the Minuteman Statue, the site of Thoreau’s sojourn has become an internationally recognized symbol of freedom. Thoreau’s purpose in building a cabin next to Walden Pond and subsisting on what he could grow nearby was to achieve freedom from capitalism, conformity, and all the other constraints of modern life. It was also, somewhat ironically it now appears, the place where he sought to extricate himself from the politics of slavery. A few weeks after setting up camp in the woods, Thoreau was stopped by Sam Staples, who in his capacity as tax collector asked Thoreau to pay his delinquent poll tax from the past six years. Thoreau refused on the grounds that the Mexican-American War was a plot on be half of the government to expand slavery. His refusal cost him a night in the Concord jail. In his account of that night, The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government (1849), Thoreau famously asserts that Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. With these words he in-spired freedom movements around the globe to use civil disobedience as a means of protesting injustice.

Almost everyone who visited me in Lincoln came to the Walden Pond State Reservation expecting to find unspoiled nature and the story of a man who sought in its bosom the inspiration and strength to fight injustice. They were never disappointed. The Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation maintains a life-size replica of Thoreau’s sparsely furnished cabin next to the parking lot so that visitors can see how serious he was in his determination to live a primitive and frontier life. There are maps posted that direct tourists to the original site of Thoreau’s hut and a well-maintained path that takes them there. When they arrive at the granite posts that mark the site, there is a sign quoting Thoreau’s assertion in Walden that he went to the woods to live deliberately. Visitors are encouraged to commit themselves to a similarly deliberate life by leaving a stone on the cairn started near the cabin’s location shortly after Thoreau’s death. Nothing distracts from the sense that one is making a sacred pilgrimage and that the pilgrimage is all about Henry David Thoreau. Clearly the Commonwealth of Massachusetts takes very seriously the terms of the gift that resulted in the creation of the reservation. In 1922, when private citizens granted eighty acres of Walden Woods to the state, they did so with the stipulation that it preserve the Walden of Emerson and Thoreau. Their version of Walden did not include the ghosts that once troubled Mary Minot. Concord’s slaves and former slaves were replaced by a minuteman at one end of town and a dedicated abolitionist at the other. In retrospect, it hardly seems surprising that I knew nothing about Concord’s slavery past until years later, after I had moved away.⁷

Because I assumed I knew what lay between the book’s covers, I did not actually read Walden until I took a graduate course on American literature. I had made so many visits over the years to Walden Woods, I knew by heart each of its signs as well as the pamphlets distributed there by the state. I was thus very familiar with Thoreau’s account of why he determined to live for two years in a tiny cabin he built on the fringes of his hometown. I wished to live deliberately, he explains, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I thought I knew, too, what Thoreau discovered during his experiment in subsistence living. My parents had a quotation from Walden hanging in our front hall exhorting my brother and me to reach for the proverbial stars: If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.⁸

Lifted out of context, as these quotations so often are on coffee mugs, calendars, bumper stickers, signs and posters, they had become platitudes. What I discovered upon reading Walden was anything but. Thoreau had a wonderful way of looking at a world he scrutinized carefully. Everything he observed was a metaphor awaiting his unique interpretation. In one example I particularly love, Thoreau describes a bug that came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years. It seems an egg had been deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it. Hatched perchance by the heat of an urn, the bug was heard gnawing out for several weeks. Thoreau uses the story as an occasion to hope for the transformation of humankind. Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society … may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer day at last!⁹

I also discovered that Thoreau was not only an extremely deft writer, but an irreverent one as well. Walden is full of puns (over five hundred by one scholar’s count). Thoreau jokes at one point that he enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it. But even as he uses potty humor (he means in part that he fertilized the land by defecating on it), Thoreau is as serious here as he is in his recounting of the bug in the farmer’s table. He did enhance the value of the land by squatting on it. Better to squat on the land (live on land you do not own) than carry the weight of a mortgage on your back. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.¹⁰

Although I was surprised and delighted by Thoreau’s poetry and his puns, I was completely unprepared for the chapter in Walden entitled